Bumper cars at sea

USS DDG collides with civilian tanker in Hormuz Strait

The MV Otoswasan

The USS Porter

Burke-class DDGs

Oopsie! The latest news from the Persian Gulf/Arabian Sea region is that an American guided-missile destroyer apparently bumped into a Panamanian-flagged oil tanker in the middle of the night while in the Strait of Hormuz.

Not good.

Understand that the Porter is about half the length of the M/V (Motor Vessel) Otowasan and displaces about 1/16^th as much water. It also is faster and more maneuverable. Which leads to the question: Why were they playing bumper cars at 1 a.m. in the morning?

Having served on a warship, it makes me wonder who did what and why. I can remember my destroyer (roughly half the size of the Porter) getting really close to some ships, but usually not close enough to bump into them.

The closest we did probably was during routine refueling exercises when we would be about 50 to 100 yards apart. We did come pretty close to an old Soviet Union trawler one time, when it was occupying the part of the sea we wanted to occupy. We were bigger, so the Russian decided that discretion was the better part of valor and got out of our way.

Then there was the time we toyed with being a hood ornament on the aircraft carrier USS Franklin D Roosevelt. It missed us, by about 400 yards, which was good because we would have been toast if we hadn’t scooted out of the way. Our captain had a little explaining to do to the admiral why the close-in plane-guard destroyer disappeared for a few seconds under the bow of the carrier moving at 30+ knots.

So, my mind has been busy trying to come up with a scenario that would put the tincan in such proximity to the lumbering oil tanker. We don’t know right now, but I have an idea that might be the answer. And it is nothing nefarious. Not necessarily smart, but nothing nefarious.

My speculation is that the Porter was training its junior officers on how to make an approach to a refueling tanker. This is a routine exercise for a warship, although they usually do it while escorting the real thing, rather than using a civilian ship as the target.

I remember, way back when, when my ship, the Merry-D, spent most of a day making passes at the oiler we were escorting across the Atlantic. Sometimes we would slide right into the right relative position (with a little bit more space than if we were actually coming alongside to refuel) and sometimes to officer conning the ship would have us just go romping by much faster than we needed to be going.

Now, I suspect, possibly, that the Porter was doing something similar, except at night (which is when destroyers usually seem to refuel. Don’t ask me why, but on my ship it seemed to be the unwritten rule that we had to refuel between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. so nobody could get a decent night’s sleep). Night approaches, obviously, are trickier than ones during daylight because it is harder to judge distances in the dark and anticipate sea state changes.

No matter what happened, the senior leadership of the Porter is in for a rough go ahead. The Navy does not take kindly to officers who play bumper cars at sea.